Thunder's Christmas Tree

(With grateful appreciation to my sister, Vicki, whose memories in addition to mine made this story special)

Christmas was always a special time at our house, not necessarily in monetary costs, but in family togetherness and love, the stuff memories are made of. Little habits and rituals, followed year after year, lead to family traditions that are passed down throughout the generations. My family has these traditions and here is the beginning of a few of them.

The first week of December, Mom would start cooking for the Christmas holidays. She would spend hours every day in the kitchen, measuring flour, breaking eggs and beating the stuff into fluffy pies and cakes. She guarded these desserts more diligently that a hen sitting on a nest full of eggs. A household full of little greedy fingers meant random swipes across the icing of whatever cake we found access to. She would clean the house from top to bottom, mopping and waxing the old painted board floors until they gleamed like a new penny. Daddy worked many long hours when we were growing up, most days it was long after dark when he came home for supper. With five girls to raise I guess he had to.

The second week of December meant the Christmas tree was brought home, usually after a family trip riding thru the pasture, looking along the edges of the woods for that perfect cedar tree to chop down. Using a live cedar and having gas heat meant a tree couldn’t be brought home too early, as the limbs tended to die and shed off no matter how much water you kept in the can it sat in. Unfortunately, with Daddy working so many hours that winter and Mom having no access to the truck he drove to work, there wasn’t a Christmas tree decorated and sitting in the living room. Asking “When” as politely as we could brought only the promise of “Soon” and that just wasn’t good enough for anxious children for very long.

By the third week of the month, we, Vicki and I had decided we had had enough. Our little sisters were whining and moaning about the lack of a tree and if our parents couldn’t find the time to get a tree, then we would do it ourselves. Without asking permission, we set out to locate and wrestle home a tree to make everyone proud. We knew we could never get a big tree or at least the type we wanted to the house alone, so we recruited Thunder, Vicki’s horse, to do the heavy work. Now the time had come to decide which weapon we would use to murder a tree. Knowing Daddy, he had all sorts of tool we could have borrowed to do the dastardly deed, but for some reason we chose a small hand axe, probably because we thought we were less likely to do bodily damage to our limbs with it than with something larger. We were ready for action.

Here we were, bundled up against the cold, riding a horse off into the woods, axe in hand, looking for the perfect tree to appease our sisters and make our parents forget our crime. We searched hours for the perfect tree, wandering through woods bounded on the top side by the pasture and at the bottom of a steep hill, an icy creek. Selection of the perfect tree is difficult, first is height, it has to be tall enough to allow many, many presents to be piled under it when the base limbs are trimmed. Second, it has to have a single center because two makes it difficult to place a star on the top. Third, almost every tree has a side that isn’t ‘perfect’, but this can be overcome by turning that side to the wall. Finally we found it, the perfect tree, and it was huge. For some reason, a tree looks smaller out in the woods----it’s when you get it home and try to squeeze it indoors that it turns into a giant. And ours was gargantuan.

After several long minutes spent fighting to untangle vines and undergrowth from around the base, we began chopping our prize down. We chopped and chopped, taking turns with the axe, until finally after what seemed like hours, we had it down on the ground. A falling tree is not always the safest thing in the world, I can tell you, because it never goes in the direction you intend for it to. And why did it take us longer than it did Daddy to bring a tree down? Oh well, one thing us girls seemed to inherit was stubbornness, although I am not sure which parent blessed us with that gene. Here we were, two preteen girls, with a ten or twelve foot cedar tree on the ground in front of us, and likely weighing hundreds of pounds. How to get it home? And we WERE taking it home, one way or another…We didn’t do all that work for nothing.


There stood the horse, capable of carrying a load on his back, surely? Somehow we were going to be sure he did. We struggled and tussled with that tree and couldn’t lift it hardly at all. Vicki always carried twine on her saddle, luckily for us. We decided to use the rope and hoist it up onto the horse’s back and let him carry it home for us. After crawling in and through the limbs of that cedar tree and wrapping the twine around it, we looped the other end around the saddle horn for leverage and began to pull. Just as we would raise it high enough to think we were going to be able to maneuver it onto his back, Thunder would shy and skitter sideways out from under the tree. Another try and he was rearing up, and shaking his head, “NO” to let us know he meant business. Vicki tried sweet talking him, cajoling and even bribery, nothing seemed to be working. After several attempts, with the results being less than promising, we were quickly convinced we were going to have to devise another way to get our treasure home.

There was no possible way we two girls could get the gigantic tree home without help. And the horse was all that was available, so Thunder was just going to have to bite the proverbial bullet and do his share of the work. No more horsy hissie fits would be tolerated! And we were going to figure out a way to ensure he did. After a bit of discussion, it was decided if he wouldn’t carry it, he was going to have to pull it home. We used the rope and rigged up a travois, similar to the type once used by Indians to pull heavy items behind their horses. After looping the rope around the cedar securely, we had to ensure the tree was far enough behind him not to hit his heels as he walked towards home. We climbed on top of Thunder’s back, Vicki in the saddle and me behind, allowing the rope pulling the tree to set under our legs and flat against the horse. It took us forever to get to the house and discover what awaited us there. We had been gone for hours and dusk was setting in.

When we arrived, there was Daddy waiting on us, a thunderous look on his face, and “Where have you been?” coming from his mouth. We were in the soup now and we knew it. Luckily the Christmas tree and our little sisters exclamations of delight diverted his attention, and likely thereby probably saved our rear ends. Between the noise our sisters made and trying to ready the tree to bring into the house, somehow our misdeeds seemed to be forgotten. Staring at that tree lying there on the cold ground in front of the house, it appeared massive, much larger than it did when compared to the trees in the woods. Daddy said it was too tall and would have to be cut down to even get it into the door. He went to work, sawing several feet off the bottom of the tree and then drug it into the house and set it up. It was still so tall the top brushed the ceiling. It almost filled the small room, smelling like Christmas, and we could hardly wait to begin decorating it.

Christmas ornaments were scarce in our family, whether from the expense or the availability I can’t begin to wonder. We had store bought lights, big bursts of primary colors the size of an egg, and tinsel, shimmering in the glow of the lights. The rest were homemade, usually by us girls, from simple things we already had or found objects. All the more special to Mom because we had made them ourselves. From plain white paper, we cut and colored bells, angels, snowflakes and balls of every hue. Sweet gum balls and pinecones, when painted with glue and rolled into glitter, became shiny explosions of color when added to the deep green of the tree. Mom cut construction paper into narrow strips, and we glued them into chains to dangle haphazardly around the limbs. Popcorn was strung and added to the tree, us kids eating as much fro the bowl as we strung. We made a huge mess, but we were happy. The tree was beautiful, as always, when the colorful lights were lit on the tree, aglow in the darkened room. We had no chimney, instead we had an old desk where we hung our stockings. Our socks were used and the younger sisters would complain that ours was bigger that theirs, as well they should be since our feet were bigger. There is always some kind of squabble in a house that holds five children. Always.

Christmas traditions began in our house with memories made just like the one described in this story. If we were lucky enough to have snow, Daddy would take us outdoors to show us reindeer tracks in the snow, which now being grown, we know were dog prints from some hound roaming around the yard. It didn’t matter if we suspected even then, we believed. As we got older, there were phone calls to my Grandmother to see if Santa had been on her roof already, hence the gentle reminder we should be in bed and asleep. At some point along the way, we began celebrating on Christmas Eve night, due to Daddy’s impatience for the site of us opening the presents, and we still do this today. I hardly ever remember getting up on Christmas morning to open gifts. Memories are special, no matter the season, but for some reason Christmas time is special. Maybe because it was Mom’s favorite holiday, a time to decorate and celebrate with family. She loved Christmas, it’s sights and sounds. Christmas this year will be the first without her. I dread it while at the same time I can hardly wait. Dread because she won’t be here. And excitement, because we will make this this the best Christmas ever. In her memory. We love you Mom.